BY STEWART SLATER

The below is part of a series considering how society has come to adopt, and in some cases, celebrate the Seven Deadly Sins. Here below I list 3 sins (and a conclusion) with the other 4/7 in a separate article here.

The Slothful Society

To be honest, I just can’t be bothered…

It is easy to see why sloth has been regarded as a sin. Back in the days of hunting and gathering, a cave person who neither hunted nor gathered was a drain on the tribe’s resources. Given that life was, back then, very much a hand (or spear) to mouth affair, this posed a risk to the collective in those times when there were no mammoths to be seen, or berries to be picked and was, therefore, strongly to be discouraged.

This sense carries on today, as any headline about benefit scroungers attests. Pulling your weight is the right’s version of the left’s paying your fair share. It is what society expects of its members.

Sorry, where were we? Went for a bit of a snooze there. Ah, yes, sloth.

Over time sloth grew to include not just those who do not do what they should, but also those who do not do what they could. Man, as Voltaire said, is guilty of all the good he did not do. If technological progress has reduced the amount of physical labour we need to do, so other developments in society have reduced the amount of moral labour we do. This has not, however, stopped us from thinking we are virtuous.

For social media allows us to display our concerns at the cost of just a few keystrokes. A few seconds are all it takes to show that we are good people fully aligned with the public mores about the tragedy du jour. This, we tell ourselves, makes us virtuous. Of course, it does not. That I occasionally post “Slava Ukraini” on Facebook counts as nothing compared to, say, housing a Ukrainian refugee. This inconvenient fact does not, however, stop me feeling good about myself. Technology enables a cheaper form of virtue allowing some of us to bathe ourselves in the warm glow of self-satisfaction while avoiding the more personally expensive but truer versions.

Similarly, the growth of the state has allowed its citizens to engage in a mass bout of moral out-sourcing. Whereas previous generations, confronted by a problem, would have had to resolve it themselves, now we insist the government does so for us. When it became known that free school meals were not distributed during the holidays, the campaign fronted by Marcus Rashford did not seek to mobilise the public to step into the gap, it mobilised the public to force the authorities to do so.

Emblematic of this was, of all institutions, the Church of England. Possessed of a multi-billion pound endowment, and a nationwide network of potential outlets, it too kept its hands in its pockets (one might compare its positively salivating enthusiasm for handing out reparations for slavery) and summoned what remains of its moral standing to demand that the government act. Virtue, previously consisting of individuals doing something, has now shrunk to them insisting other people do something.

This is, of course, convenient. No-one’s taxes have risen to pay for the meals. The Church has got to put its money in the bank rather than where its mouth is. But equally, no-one has actually done anything. There is a whole raft of good actions which people have avoided having to do, but have still given themselves credit for, no more than a form of moral free-loading.

Like refusing to do our work (do I really have to keep writing this? Can’t I just give up?), this is fundamentally laziness, seeking to gain from the efforts of others without contributing, but as a sin, sloth ranges yet wider. In the Catechism of the Roman Catholic Church, acedia (the Latin term) “refuses joy from God and is repelled by goodness”. Which is a pretty good description of modern society.

Since we decided that victimhood was a good thing (an outcome of the Christ-less Christianity we now practise – if the meek are to inherit the Earth, being as meek as possible is a reasonable strategy), we have taken to casting ourselves as victims wherever possible. When we are not posting on social media about our glamorous holidays and wonderful children, or demonstrating our fidelity to the latest trendy cause, we like to whine about whatever minor inconvenience has befallen us. There is something faintly comical about the modern habit (particularly acute among academics, I have noticed, make of that what you will) of choosing to broadcast impotent rage to thousands. It may, from those with softer hearts than mine, elicit sympathy, but it should certainly not garner respect.

This is, ironically, not a mistake that the less than totally Christian philosopher Nietzsche would have made. “My formula for greatness in a man is amor fati [loving one’s fate] – that one wants nothing to be different, not forwards, not backwards, not in all eternity. Not just bear what is necessary, still less conceal it, but love it”. For modern life is extraordinarily privileged. Not just compared to the past, but, in the West, compared to pretty much everywhere bar Japan, Korea (South, just to make that entirely clear) and Singapore. It deserves to be loved and celebrated. It deserves gratitude. The point about First World Problems is that they are hugely better than Third World Problems. But the bizarre desire to elicit pity which now envelopes much of society leads us to forget the good that the world (or God) has done us and treat a late train or missed parcel as a crisis akin to a poor harvest.

Nor is it hard to argue that we are “repelled by goodness”. If, by the latter, we mean Christianity (as we might imagine the Catholic Church would), it is clear that the modern world has become far more hostile to practitioners of that faith. The hounding, in Scotland, of Kate Forbes in contrast to the respect given to the equally, if differently, devout Humza Yousaf, suggests a problem with Christians not the practitioners of religion in general. As does the treatment of street preachers and those who pray silently outside abortion clinics.

Even if we broaden the definition to mean morality as opposed to any particular religion’s conception of it, it is clear that recent times have seen a remarkable number of behaviours which have been recategorised from bad to good. Judgement, however, has gone in the opposite direction. Individuals have now become the arbiters of the righteousness of their actions, and it is the others who seek to judge them who have become sinners. Everyone should be allowed to do what everyone wants to do and anyone seeking to criticise them must be stopped. Elevating the pursuit of individual whims to the highest good is not morality, however, it is the negation of it.

“Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law” was a dictum which earned Aleister Crowley the title of “the wickedest man in the world”. In today’s slothful world, it would get him a column in The Guardian.

The Gluttonous Society

“If you crush a cockroach, you’re a hero. If you crush a beautiful butterfly, you’re a villain. Morals have aesthetic criteria”.

This may, or may not, be strictly true for morality, but it is certainly true of gluttony. Go to a Michelin-starred restaurant in London, order the rib of beef and, if you share it with a friend, in that course alone, you will consume as many calories as someone who scoffs two Big Macs. You, however, will be an individual of taste and sophistication, he will be a pig.

For, when we judge how much someone eats, we are often actually judging what they eat and who is eating it. An office worker picking at a salad may well be consuming a higher proportion of their required intake than a builder scoffing a foot-long sandwich from Subway but we will praise the former and condemn the latter. Rationing during the war, not disparaged today as a time of trimalchian excess, was designed to give people 3,000 calories a day – 20-50% higher than recommended for today’s more sedentary population. How much one needs to eat might determine whether one is actually guilty of over-eating, but it does not determine whether one will be accused of gluttony.

For, our attitudes to food are proxies for our attitudes to a raft of different matters, not least of which is class. We use food to judge people, and we use people to judge food. The office worker with the salad is the right sort of person eating the right sort of food, the builder the wrong sort of person eating the wrong sort of food. Many of those who sneer at Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives (an ebullient American tours his country, sampling the often surprisingly good food in its less salubrious restaurants) can’t get enough of programmes about lavish Georgian or Victorian banquets. The difference is not the calories consumed but that they consider the people at the latter their equals (in this, most, of course, delude themselves – Hyacinth Bucket being every bit as representative of the country as John Bull or Britannia) and those in the former their inferiors.

Gluttony is not a sin committed by people like us who eat like us. In the same way that we reserve the adjective “sinful” for expenditure we cannot, ourselves, afford, only other people can be gluttons. It is less an objective description and more a tribal slur, a way to signal disapproval of others. A leading light in the Ultra-Processed Food movement may castigate Pizza Hut but still unironically take a journalist out for pizza and gelato made by someone who “grew up nearby” and “lives around the corner”; this is not morality or even science (whether something was made “with love” is apparently a key determinant of UPF status) but a tribal grab for the social high ground similar to those made by the mean girls in any high school movie.

We are a hypocritical species and we are a petty species and it would be easy to see accusations of gluttony as one of the status games we play – eating a lot is fine when the right people do it in the right places, wrong when wrong people do it in the wrong places. But there is a risk of our attitude doing real harm.

For, recent years have seen the launch of a new range of drugs which appear to be highly successful at helping people lose weight. This is, given the range of medical conditions in which obesity has been implicated, a good thing. But it has not been greeted with unalloyed joy. Tune into any television discussion of the issue, and at least one participant will be rather sniffy about the new drugs, suggesting that they make losing weight too easy.

People who are fat are people who have eaten too much. Since doing so is a sin, they should not be able to escape its consequences without suffering, particularly if they expect the public purse to pay for it. The only reasonable approach for them to take is to atone and do the penance of a rigorous diet and exhausting exercise regime. Had the Middle Ages been fat-phobic (a glance at portraits from the period suggests they were not), this is the approach they would have taken.

But times have moved on. We know that an individual’s propensity to obesity is, in large part, a result of their genes. Their weight is not purely a consequence of what they eat, but also of who they are. If Lee Kuan Yew could decide (in his eighties) that since homosexuality now appeared to be genetic, it was wrong for it to be a criminal offence in Singapore (a position it took his son’s government a further fifteen years formally to endorse), should we not similarly see obesity less as a moral failing and more as a condition we should attempt to mitigate? Those who suffer from it to be pitied and helped rather than sneered at?

That both genes and actions are involved allows us to choose which to credit according to taste. Those we like must obviously be the helpless victims of their genetic inheritance, those we dislike are getting what they deserve for the choices they have made. This is, of course, convenient. The new drugs may be successful, but they are also expensive – a year’s course of Wegovy from the private sector costs c. £3,500. Not only do accusations of gluttony give us the moral high ground from which to sneer at our out-group, they save us money; win-win.

Not really. A public health-care system shares the costs of treatment across the public. Not paying for weight-loss drugs today means paying the cost of treating conditions caused by obesity tomorrow. And that will be rather more than a course of Wegovy. The rational thing, unless we want to scrap the NHS, is to make it as widely available as possible.

But that would mean that they might lose weight, something difficult to do sustainably as yo-yo dieters will attest, and it means we will not be able to watch them struggle as they attempt to do so. Better just to accuse them of gluttony and watch them suffer.

The Greedy Society

A scriptwriter wishing to site their production in the eighties has some obvious visual cues to use which can do so quickly – Margaret Thatcher (particularly saying “No. No. No.”), Rocky in his stars-and-stripes trunks pounding Ivan Drago’s Soviet beefcake, Gordon Gekko who, if time allows, will be shown giving his “Greed is Good” speech.

For we think of the eighties as the greedy decade, uniquely avaricious. This is, of course, wrong. There are more City bankers than there were back then and they earn more (to Gekko, $1mn was “just a day’s pay”, to those at the top of the hedge fund tree, it is spare change). All that has changed is they have stopped wearing braces. Hello magazine allows “celebrities” – some of whom you may have heard of – to flaunt their wealth to an adoring public, a much greater reach than any yuppie’s Porsche. Footballers have moved from being well-paid to be positively rich.

The difference between the eighties and today is that pursuit of wealth is no longer an unusual thing, but the accepted thing. It is what people do. It has been normalised. The possession of wealth, however, to a large swathe of society, has not.

At what may turn out to be the first of many campaign launches, Labour’s Wes Streeting promised an “NHS for the many, paid for by the few”. The NHS needs money, the rich have money, so the latter should fund the former. It matters not that they may be paying the taxes they owe, and that the top 1% of earners already pay 34% of the income tax collected despite generating only 15% of the income taxed, they should pay their “fair share” by which, of course, he means more than they are currently. Those who take steps to avoid this are being greedy.

As the American economist, Thomas Sowell said, “I’ve never understood why it is greed to want to keep the money you have earned, but not greed to want to take somebody else’s money”. For, well-intentioned though he doubtless believes himself to be, that is exactly what Streeting is proposing to do. Facing a funding gap, there is no suggestion of reducing outgoings, his only method of raising the funds he thinks he needs is to take them from someone else. A believer in true equality would want an “NHS for the many, funded by the many” but Streeting wants the wealthy to be treated differently and worse than others. They are, in some ways, lesser beings. They have become wealthy through greed and they deserve to suffer for it.

Those on the left would, no doubt, dispute this characterisation. The money they wish to raise, they intend to use for the benefit of society. This is noble, not greedy. Sowell may have a point when it comes to robber barons, but not when it comes to dedicated and selfless public servants. Robin Hood was a hero, not a villain.

Keir Starmer tells a story about his mother. During his childhood, she contracted an illness for which there was no cure and which became increasingly debilitating. As she was on her deathbed she told him that, under no circumstances was he to allow his father to move her to the private sector, even if he could afford to do so. She had worked in the NHS and she wanted to die in the NHS. He tells this story frequently, so he obviously thinks her behaviour praiseworthy, an impressive sign of solidarity.

A prominent left-wing journalist proudly confessed on national television that he never uses the private medical insurance provided by his employer. He believes in solidarity and uses the NHS like everyone else.

If Starmer’s father could have paid for his mother’s treatment, the NHS would not have needed to. By staying in the state system, she chose to impose a cost on the public purse. She behaved in such a way as to allow him to “keep the money he had earned”. Why is that praise-worthy and not just greedy? What is the difference between that and an individual arranging their tax affairs so as to reduce their payments to HMRC? Failing to use medical insurance again results in a burden being placed on others who do not need to bear it. The same can be said for those who can afford to educate their children privately but do not. Time and again, we see those on the left engaging in and extolling behaviour which saves them money by forcing others to spend theirs at the same time as they condemn those who do not “pay their fair share” for raising the costs on “hard-working families”.

I am an only child so “solidarity” is a word I can spell but perhaps do not fully understand. The Greeks, however, would tell us that the virtues are not always virtuous – courage may usually be good, but not when displayed by a suicide bomber. The context matters. Virtue which comes at a cost to the individual is more praiseworthy than that which comes at a cost to others – sympathy is good, kicking someone so you have an opportunity to feel sympathetic towards them less so. The potentially admirable emotion one may feel from a bad action does not magically make that action good, instead, the action reduces the value of the emotion. Already freeloading in a material sense, all the left’s invocations of “solidarity” mean is that they are freeloading in a moral one too.

This may seem partisan and it may seem harsh. And in many ways, it is. But the left show clearly how an increasingly tribal society has come to use sin against its opponents. Seeking to reduce the money one gives to the Treasury is functionally the same as taking more from it than one needs. In both cases, it ends up with less than it “should” have. Both should be bad or neither should. But in our contentious times, one has a sin, the other a virtue, the only difference being who commits them.

Were I to invent my own list of sins, I am not sure greed would make the list. Gekko is not wrong when he says it has “marked the upward surge of mankind”. The greed of individuals often brings a benefit to mankind as a whole. Moreover, it is natural – we are built to hoard and expand our resources. But near the top of the list would be hypocrisy and whether or not we should decry the left for its greed, we should certainly condemn it for that.

The Sinful Society

So where does this spin through the sins get us?

There are, I think, a few themes that emerge.

Tribalism

Our view of sin depends on who we believe has committed it. As we noted in “Anger”, being angry is, for some, perfectly fine, indeed, it is to be encouraged. Those are, of course, people with whom we agree or to whom we consider ourselves similar. Ditto, gluttony – it is not eating too much per se which is wrong, it is eating too much of the food people like us do not eat. Although we are no longer Christian and therefore have no reason to believe in the religion’s definition of sinfulness, it retains sufficient cultural power that the things it frowned upon remain the sticks with which we choose to beat our opponents.

There is a paradox here, however. For while the concepts we continue to use are Christian, we do so in a way which is post-Christian. The religion encourages an awareness of one’s own wrong-doing and uses that to discourage us from attacking the wrong-doing of others – it is only he who is without sin who is allowed to cast the first stone. 

Connecting the Dots

This is not the only incoherence in our modern view of sin. As we saw in “Pride” and “Lust”, we are reluctant to follow what we know to its logical conclusion if doing so is inconvenient to us. Pride makes us feel good, so we take it from characteristics which are the result of neither our choices nor our efforts. Intelligence and conscientiousness are just as genetically-based as beauty, but we continue to regard success earned by the former as more worthy than that earned through the latter. As our knowledge of the world has improved, we have failed to update our moral intuitions to reflect what we have learned. In part this is to allow us to disparage those whom we dislike, in part so we have reason to feel good about ourselves.

Self-Image

Having a positive image amongst one’s peers has always been a social benefit – people are more likely to cooperate with those they think good or admirable. As society has widened out, this has become more important as the range of people with whom we could potentially cooperate has grown – in a mediaeval village, everyone had to cooperate to survive, whether they liked each other or not. A modern human who takes the hump with Tesco can go to Sainsburys. As a result, we take the ability offered us by social media carefully to craft the image we project and, as we saw in “Envy”,  expend great effort in doing so.

But, as the French moralist La Rouchefoucauld said, “We are so accustomed to disguising ourselves to others that we frequently become disguised to ourselves.” Those quick to condemn others’ greed are slow to recognise their own. The decline of religion has made it easier for us to believe we are good, and so we have come to believe that we are good. With, as we noted in “Anger”, egos which struggle with any contradiction of their self-image, we then have to insist that others see us as we see ourselves. That we have no right to demand this, and little ability to control how we think matters not. The world must, as we saw in “Lust”, treat us in the way that we want to be treated.

You may have read the foregoing and formed an impression of me as some sort of self-regarding moralist who has climbed on his high horse to castigate his inferiors, like a fire-and-brimstone preacher confident of his own salvation. That is your right, but it was not my intention. For, I do not regard myself as a particularly good person – far too much has happened for that to be a remotely tenable proposition – nor do I think there is anything particularly wrong with not being a good person – few of us are. As Susan Sontag said, “10% of any population is cruel, no matter what, and 10% is merciful, no matter what and the remaining 80% can be moved in either direction”. Should we not, therefore, condemn a little less and understand a little more?

Stewart Slater works in Finance. He invites you to join him at his website.